old previews - King and Country

A new team of programmers are apparently intending to take over this project,
but being realistic I don't expect it will ever see the light of day. Here's
the original preview:

Software7 are currently working on a brand new overhead war strategy game entitled
King and Country, although no precise release date has been given - they missed 1997, but apparently work is still continuing on the project. You are placed in charge of a castle and a small army
which you must then develop in order to defeat the opposing armies, which are
controlled by the computer. The game is set in the middle ages, but it is still
under development and so no details have been finalised yet. However, Software7
released the following information in May 1996(!):

This text is a direct reproduction of the released information, and is
copyright Software7:

At the start of the game the player will start with a basic wooden castle, with only enough features to train very basic soldiers. As they progress through the levels they will obtain more powerful castles which can train very powerful mounted knights. Each level in the game will have a different map and a different set of completion goals.

The player can add new buildings to their settlement, such as blacksmiths to upgrade the strength of their warriors swords and armour, a stable to obtain mounted knights. Some of these buildings will be separate buildings on the map, others may be added internally to the castle. The list of buildings so far is:

The temple is an upgradeable building. In it's initial state it Mages can only cast quite basic spells, upgrading the temple will allow them to obtain greater powers to the extent that they can summon demons to fight with you.

The game is completely non-user dependant, ie the computer will continue to move it's players in the background, it does not need to wait for the user to do something ( a pause feature will be supplied :) ).

The display used in the game has not been decided on, we would prefer to use a fairly high-resolution screen mode such as 640x480 (VGA) but this may not be possible due to restrictions in the market. The game will feature high quality 3D rendered graphics where appropriate. We will rely quite heavily on digitised sound, for battle sounds, unit acknowledgments and building sounds.

Due to the amounts of data that will be used for graphics and sound two versions of the game will be produced. One will be supplied on floppy discs and will include limited sound and only still graphics for the intro/end sequences. The second version will be supplied on a CD-ROM and will include much high quality sampled sound at both 8-bit and 16-bit quality for those which can use it. It will also include 3D rendered animation sequences for the introduction and end sequences with full colour graphics for use on Risc PCs and A7000s.

Darklands,
Fantasia's ToyParty
and VOTI's EMD
have all reported signs of life in the recent past, whilst
Skirmish
is apparently still ongoing but is way behind schedule and it looks like it might well
never make it out.
TEK and
Iron Dignity
are still on the way, although again both are pretty heavily delayed. And as for R-Comp's
port of F16 Fighting Falcon, it looks
like it will never be released, having been killed by frame-rates that were just too low.